Nothing to See Here—Just James Franco Apparently Being Whipped by a Man in Chaps

If you were ever curious what an R-rated, James Franco–directed commercial set to house music and featuring S&M gear would look like, you are in luck: the actor and backhanded-comment master has unveiled a 15-minute short called La Passione. The Los Angeles Timesreports that the video was “[i]ntended as a meta-narrative meditation on physical transcendence,” while Franco himself said earlier this year that it examined how “the ideal can only exist on the higher planes of digital construction—within videos, photographs, or online, in general.” Without that context, though, viewers might think that it is just a chance for Franco to play toreador with a guy wearing a papier-mâché bull head and to direct Joan of Arc being burnt at the stake in a Gucci mono-kini.

But who are we to try to interpret James Franco’s next-level art, or draw conclusions about a sequence in which a man wearing chaps appears apropos of nothing and whips someone who appears to be (via reaction shot) James Franco? (Who, dressed in black-tie, still looks characteristically handsome despite the extremely weird circumstances.) We are the same people who unsuccessfully tried to add a career subsection to Franco’s Wikipedia page called “Definitely Artsy but Seriously, W.T.F.?”

The short is a riff on Carl Theodore Dreyer’s groundbreaking 1928 silent movie The Passion of Joan of Arc, according to the L.A. Times. Sponsored by Gucci, La Passione is meant to celebrate the opening of a new store in São Paulo, Brazil—obviously.